EP 01&02 - Was the Wild West Wild?

Was the Wild West Wild?

- Episodes 01 & 02 -

#47 The Law-less Frontier
#48 Gun smoke and mirrors

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#47 A law-less frontier (Ep1) #48 Gun smoke and mirrors (Ep2)

Friday 13 January 2023

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#47 A law-less frontier #48 Gun smoke and mirrors

Cabinet photograph captioned in the negative, 'Calamity Jane, Gen. Crook's Scout'. An early view of Calamity Jane wearing buckskins, with an ivory-gripped Colt Single Action Army revolver tucked in her hand-tooled holster, holding a Sharps rifle.

Americans... at their heart, Frontiers-Folk?

Let us tell you a story. It matters because it gets to the heart of who many Americans think they are. Frontiers-people.

In the Spring of 1871, Charley Hester rode into Abilene, Kansas. He’d tramped up the Chisholm trail from Texas with 250 head of cattle and a gang of eight other cowboys. It was weeks since they’d had a shave or a drink. Charley was 18.

CHARLEY: 'I’d heard about Abilene… 600 feet down to water and 6 inches down to hell. The last Abilene marshal – Tom ‘Bear River’ Smith - had just been gunned down, murdered by the outlaws, cattle rustlers, and common variety of Texas punchers.

'A new marshal had just ridden into town. James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. He shot first and talked afterwards…and he took every opportunity to feather his own nest.’

While he was in Abilene, Charley Hester realised with a shock that he’d recognised a wanted killer. John Wesley Hardin was up from Texas under a false name. But Charley kept his mouth shut.

CHARLEY: ‘If [any]one made an accusing remark that was not backed up with a six-gun he was very apt to read his own obituary next morning while he cooled his heels awaiting admittance to the lower regions.’

Even Wild Bill Hickock couldn’t prevent Hardin shooting a man in one of the town hotels. Hardin got away, Charley remembered, by climbing through an upstairs window ‘like a turpentined cat.’

Welcome to the Wild West.

#47 A Law-less frontier
Ep 1 Was the Wild West Wild?

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, 1890, Italy. Royale Photographie, Rome

Wild West characters - a blurring between reality and the fiction of dime novels

‘Calamity Jane’ was in fact Martha Jane Cannary. She’d been orphaned at 14 and brought up her five younger siblings in frontier Wyoming. Later she befriended the soldier, scout and gambler James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, the corrupt marshal who was bringing some kind of law and order to Abilene when Charley Hester had ridden in.

It was the dime novels that turned Jane Cannary into the whip-cracking, pistol-shooting ‘Calamity Jane’ who rode shotgun messenger on a stagecoach.

But Calamity Jane and ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok didn’t only show up in the dime novels. They played themselves - in live stageshows that were created by that other dime-novel favourite - the ex-soldier, buffalo hunter William Frederick Cody – better known as Buffalo Bill.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became an entertainment sensation in the 1880s. A phenomenon. Cody’s huge company – eventually 500 entertainers, including 100 Native Americans - re-enacted battles like Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. Loo-tenant Colonel George Custer’s nemesis – Chief Sitting Bull – even took a turn in Buffalo Bill’s shows himself.

There were displays of horsemanship and ropemanship. There was a buffalo hunt. Then a stage coach would burst into the arena, its occupants bristling with guns. It was pursued by a screaming posse of Indians. But the Native Americans – mostly Sioux, who incidentally were paid the same as the whites and the Mexicans – were not only there to fight. They also created an ‘Indian Village’ where visitors could sample their way of life and witness their ceremonies and dances.

In 1887 the latest version of the show – entitled ‘The Drama of Civilisation’ – travelled to London as part of ‘Buffalo Bill’s American Exhibition of Arts, Inventions, Manufactures and Resources of the United States.’

It extended over 7 acres in Earl’s Court. Within a week it had played a command performance to Queen Victoria herself. For six months spectators packed in – 20 000 people paying at least a shilling, 14 shows a week.

By the end, over two million had seen it and they’d launched Bill Cody’s operation into the showbiz stratosphere.

Why do so many Americans revere the notion of a wild west tamed only by man and his gun?

Otero County Commissioner, Couy Griffin, was found guilty of trespassing in his raid on the Capitol 6 Jan 2021, but was acquitted of disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail (not served) a $3000 fine, 60 days of community service, and supervised release for a duration of one year

Gun culture does not a society make

Ever since at least the 1860s, dime novels and stage entertainments and movies have played on the image of the cowboys and their bad-man, good-man image. Ever since at least the 1890s, American writers and politicians and presidents have used that image to create the notion of an American people – no, let’s be honest here, what they called it was an American race – that was virile, noble, gun-toting, self-reliant, forged in the deprivations and challenges of the frontier.

The problem is that many historians have argued that the wild west never existed. Some of them are anarchocapitalists like Terry Anderson and PJ Hill, who wrote a widely quoted article ‘The Not so Wild, Wild West’ for the Republican Hoover Institution. They argued that the wild west only went wild when the government got involved. Before that, everything was incredibly well run. This is an inspiration behind #CowboysforTrump for example!

The argument doesn't stand up any longer than it takes to check out the examples they give.

It ignores the fact that there is no protection for your mining community or your wagon train settlement if your locally ‘elected’ council turns out to be run by some gang of bullies, who use it to enrich themselves. It ignores the fact that the big cattle ranchers, who hired gunmen to create and keep their monopoly, ended up sparking feuds like the Texas Wars.

The fundamental problem with the myth that violence is OK because we’re a frontier society and each American has to look after his/her self is that it completely ignores the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans and enslavement of black people. It also doesn't stack up as history.

#47 Gun Smoke and Mirrors - Ep 2 Was the Wild West Wild?

1960s TV series Wagon Train

Since at least the 1940s, the homesteaders have been ridiculed by most historians

To get back to the title of these podcasts, how much violence was there on the American frontier? Was it everywhere, or only in some places and times? Was there peace where the gun toting cowboys kept anarchocapitalist order or was there peace where hardworking families eked out a living?

When you actually crunch the numbers, you find what most observers on the ground always said. Violence was (like everywhere else in the world, in all periods of history), confined to large towns and the places where there were unusual concentrations of young men (in this case cattle ranching and mining.)

Homesteading was the driving force behind the settlement of the rest of the American west. It was hard work and orderly. It was not the wild west.

10-12% of homesteaders were women. In contrast to the movie stereotypes of harlots and reluctant wives dragged out west, these studies show that many were professional women, who took homesteads and hired labour for extra income. Others were farmers’ daughters who took adjoining claims in order to extend the family holdings.

Many were widows, or became widows before 'proving up' (legally establishing their claim) and were helped to complete the process by their neighbours. It’s no accident that the first place in the world to give women the vote was Wyoming, in 1869.

Of course, it was no bed of roses. It was a hard, sometimes grim way of life. Historian Sheryll Patterson-Black has collected profoundly impressive stories, for example, of the women’s life.

‘Mother herded cattle all day long in the broiling hot sun, so the children could attend a Fourth of July celebration in a nearby community. The next morning around two a.m., I was born. No doctor, no nurse, no midwife, just Mother and God.’

The mother in this case, which comes from the 1880s was Mary O’Kieffe, who had deserted her useless husband on the Missouri, fixed up a cover for their farm wagon, loaded two dozen hens aboard, tied her milk-cattle alongside and trekked 500 miles with her older children in 51 days. Then she built a sod house, sunk a well and stayed.

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